Split a $1,800 mortgage between two roommates and “everyone pays $900” sounds fair — until one earns $95k and the other earns $45k. Equal isn’t always fair. For households where incomes don’t match — roommates, partners, family members pooling for a mortgage — an equitable split proportional to income is often the arrangement that actually works.

That’s the problem Household Budget solves. It’s live on its own domain, with the source on GitHub.

The experience

The app has three moving parts. First you add the People: a name and a yearly salary, and the app immediately shows each person’s share of household income. Then the Bills: a name, an amount, a frequency, and — the whole point — a split option:

• Evenly: the bill divides by headcount, the classic 50/50 (or 33/33/33 with three roommates).
• Equitably: the bill divides by income, so someone earning 60% of the household income carries 60% of that bill.

Each bill gets its own split option, because real households are mixed — a streaming service might split evenly while the mortgage splits by income. The Budgets view then rolls it all up: each person’s monthly contribution, and what they owe per paycheck.

That per-pay number is my favorite detail. If your household is paid bi-weekly, two months a year contain a third paycheck — and budgets that ignore that “overpopulate” their categories those months, exactly as I noted in the project README. Household Budget computes per-pay contributions from the actual pay frequency, so every deposit matches reality.

And because this is financial data, it’s local-first: everything lives in your browser’s localStorage. No account, no server, no analytics. The Data view exports your setup as text you can copy to a clipboard (or paste back in on another device).

The technology

I built it with Vue 3 and Vuetify on Vite, with Pinia managing the state. The whole domain model lives in one small store:

• A household store holds people and bills, with getters for total income and total bills, persisted to localStorage so data survives refreshes without a backend.
• The equitable split is one honest line of math: each person’s share is their salary / household income × bill amount, while an even split is simply bill amount / number of people.
• Frequencies are first-class: monthly and bi-weekly bills map to per-pay contribution calculations rather than naive monthly averages.
• The UI leans on Vuetify’s data tables and dialogs for People, Bills, and Budgets, with a sidebar layout and responsive behavior for mobile.
• A single GitHub Actions workflow deploys the built app to GitHub Pages behind the budget.davemainville.com custom domain.

What it taught me

The interesting engineering in this app isn’t the framework — it’s refusing the default assumption. Nearly every split-the-bill tool on the market is built around equal shares, and the moment a household’s income is uneven, those tools stop being useful. Modeling the real arrangement — per-person income, per-bill split rules, per-paycheck deposits — is what made this one worth building.

If you’ve ever split a mortgage or rent unevenly on a spreadsheet and resented updating it every month, give Household Budget a try.